Author /thomasknoll

As a mentor at 500Startups, Techstars, and our work at Revelry, I get to help hundreds of entrepreneurs build their ideas and their teams.

While all of our conversations are personal and confidential, I occasionally get a question or comment that resonates so broadly it is easy to share anonymously and hopefully be useful to others.

Here is a recent conversation:

Entrepreneur:

I just wanted to touch base with you on the prototype. Things are going alright, to be optimistic, it’s just very stressful. I am creating my own product which requires a lot of creative thinking. It’s also very easy to get unmotivated because you’re saying to yourself, “Is this even worth it? I feel like no one will want to acquire me or invest in me,”.

I know that’s not the true mindset of an innovator or an entrepreneur but I’m only [redacted] and I’m surrounded by a lot of jealous people. People who just think I’m “cute” and don’t take me seriously. I know that since I believe in myself and since I want to put the hard work, blood, sweat, tears, and much more into [redacted] I will get exactly what I want.

I just feel like maybe you have some advice for someone who gets discouraged. I know I can’t be the only person who gets like this. I’ve read things on how Steve Jobs would sometimes, rarely, get doubtful. I don’t know. I just know that this will work. I know it will I just want to make sure that after this prototype I will get the acquisition or investment I want.

Response:

Every successful entrepreneur in the entire world fights the demons of doubt and fear and imposter syndrome.
Every successful entrepreneur in the entire world chooses to get up each day and slay those demons by DOING something and taking the next step forward by either
(1) doing it themselves, or
(2) successfully delegating the next step(s) to someone on the team.

The arena is littered with the dead and maimed bodies of gladiators who failed to get back up.
The arena is empty of the people who gave up and walked away from a fight they could have won.
or, AND THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT…
The arena is empty of the people who walked away to fight another day, because they realized this wasn’t their battle.

It is OK to struggle.
It is OK to give up.
It is OK to ask for help.

It is NOT OK to literally kill yourself over any idea
It is NOT OK to literally kill yourself over anyone expectations of what you “should” do or who you “should” be
It is NOT even OK to grind yourself down and burn yourself up for any of these things

If this is your dream, you have to live it.
If you want to create something from nothing, you have to provide all the something.
No one else is going to make it for you.

Next Action

Read “Letters to a Young Poet” by Rainer Maria Rilke, and ask yourself, “Do I have to build this thing?” If so, there you go.

No one can advise or help you – no one. There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to [create]; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to [create]. This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I [create]?

As a mentor at 500Startups, Techstars, and our work at Revelry, I get to help hundreds of entrepreneurs build their ideas and their teams.

While all of our conversations are personal and confidential, I occasionally get a question or comment that resonates so broadly it is easy to share anonymously and hopefully be useful to others.

Here is a recent conversation:

Entrepreneur:

Direct sales of a “thing” has never been my strength. I’m better at selling ideas.

Response:

Isn’t a “thing” just an idea?

I am not trying to be coy. In my experience everything is really just a story. For example, I have learned – as a person who leans more ‘emotional’ than ‘logical’ – that even people who consider themselves extremely logical are still ultimately making decisions based on their feelings about the logic. Which means everything is story telling. Specifically, telling the story in the language people speak.

My last company helped businesses and brands build long-term relationships with customers. We were selling to ‘business’ buyers instead of ‘consumer’ buyers. But the story I told around the product was that there isn’t really any such things as the B2B or B2C categories. Instead, we proposed that at end of the day everything is H2H, or Human to Human. So, as business professionals, our primary goal should be improving the way we, as humans, can provide value to other humans – regardless whether that human carries a business wallet or a personal wallet.

All of this to say, I suspect that all your experience and skills in selling ideas should actually be a competitive advantage to you as you work on selling the idea of this thing.

Next Action

Can you maybe spend 10 minutes today writing down a list of tactics/habits that make you great at selling ideas, and then turn around and spend 10 minutes reframing those statements into tactics/habits for selling your thing?

Responding to a straight forward poll in CMX Hub, a facebook group organized by David Spinks of CMX, which asks, “Are you more introverted or extroverted?”

The poll is still in progress but there has constantly been 2x more primary introverts than extroverts responding. Which got me thinking:

Honestly makes sense to me for this audience. I don’t think introversion is a requirement for online community building, but there are quite a few characteristics that maybe make it something people gravitate toward.

blanket IMHO:

1. Great online community cultivation requires a lot of heads down alone time in the computer. An introvert doesn’t feel the need to always get away from the computer and into big group meetings and a ton of high energy face to face meetings. So an introvert is more likely to head this way than towards, say, sales.

2. Rather than charging in and taking over a situation, an introvert is more likely to want to hear out (read) what people are saying, and spend more time (than an extrovert) processing that information and thinking about it, before injecting our own take.

3. An introvert is fed by more behind-the-scenes type work… massaging along the health of the community, than trying to push it the direction we want from the front of the crowd.

4. hmmm, more, but I’d have to think longer 😉

bonus: it would be really interesting to me to see a break down of the *type* of communities that primary introverts vs primary extroverts are working on.

bonus bonus: it would be really interesting to me to see a break down of the *type* of role that primary introverts vs primary extroverts hold w/in their company

The kid crashed after a busy morning running around the lake and the park. Mama is off with friends at lunch. I finally have a moment to catch up on cleaning up, de-duping, and bucketing my contacts with Contactually. Which helps me with my goal of keeping in touch with people.

Dennis spent 25 years of his life becoming a knowledgable expert in everything movies. Streaming has a curation problem. Seems like a no-brainer to scoop these people up.

In the last days of the store, daily life at the store got pretty intense. Longtime customers were bereft. We tried to comfort them, explaining how our owner had ensured that our whole collection would soon be available at the public library — for free, even! It didn’t help much. Almost to a one, they had the same reply: “But you won’t be there to help us.”

“The human species will have to populate a new planet within 100 years if it is to survive,” famed physicist Stephen Hawking, PhD says in “Expedition New Earth”

Reagardless which alternate facts you prefer to believe… setting up a plan B sounds like a good idea. I’d prefer that we figure out ways to take care of the planet we have, and follow through with those solutions. But, if I wanted to bet on the next big thing, it would be: any technology or program designed to help the human species populate a second or third new planet.

My boy is almost two. He runs toward the stairs on the deck. I can’t tell if he is going to slow down. I run to catch him. He stops at the top step and looks over the cliff of 3 steps to the ground.

He has his own table and chair set. A little wooden table and chairs that look all adult, but tiny. And if you turn your back to him for 7 seconds, he’s standing on a chair reaching for, well, anything.

I can’t stop him from ever falling down. He will get bumps and bruises. And if I somehow managed to never let him fall, well, then he’d be all kinds of messed up for other reasons.

No kid is gonna watch “13 Reasons Why” and be surprised, this is the life they live.

It’s only the rest of us, with school deep in the rearview mirror who will be shocked, that it’s still the same, growing up is so difficult, you don’t fit in, you don’t know who to turn to, you think about ending it…